


Parting Gift

by speculate



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Gen, Happy Ending, I promise, Just Friendship, No pairings really, i guess this is a death fic, oh and brief description of violence, so i really don't have anything to tag this with, sort of a conversation on the afterlife
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-18
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-09 03:09:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1140725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speculate/pseuds/speculate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gavin Free is dead. Yup—as a doornail. Or, how Gavin traverses an offbeat afterlife all his own populated with incarnations of his coworkers and maybe (no promises) learns some lessons to carry with him, if he can ever find his way back home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. footprints

**Author's Note:**

> first ao3 fic! first rooster teeth fic! not anywhere near my first ever fic!
> 
> i wanted to write something that would be entertaining for both myself and an audience that could have a wide cast as well as grey areas for me to take creative liberties with plot. this is the product of that. following parts will be way longer than this.

Gavin Free is dead.

Yup—as a doornail. He was dead before the ambulance even arrived on the scene, whirring away its sirens that would be off when it left. The paramedics heave him onto a gurney, knowing it’s too late but trying anyway, hooking him up to monitors and wires and trying to electroshock some life back into him. And as things go, it doesn’t work.

The sound of him coding in the ambulance as his body is shocked up off the gurney grates on the ears of everyone surrounding. The scene of the accident had drawn quite a crowd; they all lean in and try to avoid the officials keeping them back. The totaled vehicles left behind by the wreck spark and flare, and the distinctly louder sound of fire engines raise up as they tear towards the scene. And Geoff Ramsey wails, a terrible, miserable cry of raw human emotion, as the paramedics call it at 4:52 on a Sunday.

But Gavin doesn’t know any of that. He’s dead, after all—has been dead for about five minutes. Perhaps if he hadn’t been killed on impact he might know more than he does, but whatever it is that makes the big decisions had apparently decided that all Gavin Free needs to know to move forward is a flash of red, and if he concentrates very hard, the sound of glass shattering at his right ear. The last thing he’ll ever remember.

Then he’s somewhere else, somewhere wooded and unfamiliar. It all starts again there, when he regains some sort of strange consciousness, in what looks like a forest during winter. There’s snow on pines and fluffy, untouched blankets of it on the ground. He’s up to his ankles in it.

And it’s light—an aside he’s not thankful for until he notices it. He can’t imagine how scary this would be if it was dark. When he thinks this, something way down inside him from a part of his life he doesn’t remember tells him, you should be more scared than this. But the other part of him, which shines white in his mind’s eye, lets him know that it’s all right. His heart isn’t pounding regardless.

But then he takes a step forward and it’s silent. He pauses, cocks his head to the side, and does it again. There, in the distinct place where there should be the sound of his converse crunching in snow, is nothing. And then he realizes that there’s nothing anywhere. He should be freezing. He hasn’t seen more than a flurry since the last time he was back in England, which was ages ago. It was hot in Austin, the last time he remembers. He’s wearing jeans and converse that aren’t getting wet despite being covered in snow and a People Like Grapes shirt and that’s it—he knows that the chill should be biting at every inch of exposed skin but it’s not. He’s comfortably at room temperature, like he has a thermostat all his own. That’s the scariest. It makes his heart rate pick up, almost, because there’s still that nagging feeling of security and meaninglessness that reminds him that worrying won’t do him any good, not anymore. But there’s no sound. No birds chirping, no wind blowing, no nothing, and the maddening silence starts to ring in his ears, and—

“Hey, fuckface.”

Gavin whirls around and Michael is there. He looks the way he did the first time Gavin ever saw him—not as filled out as he is now, not quite grown into himself, with masses of curly brown hair shoved into a knitted hat. “Michael?” he asks, because he is uncertain.

Michael gives him a small smile, like a parting gift. It’s the rare, genuine kind, reserved for those times when neither of them are being assholes, not even a little bit, not even jokingly. Michael nods to something behind Gavin. “That way, Gavvers.”

Gavin turns around and there’s a path winding its way out into the trees. He’s almost certain it wasn’t there before and looks well-treaded and, Gavin thinks, very lonely. He whirls back around with a fleeting, “Michael, are you—?” but the spot where Michael had been standing is vacant, and there’s not any footprints in the snow.

Gavin sets out along the trail, and his shoes crunch as he does so.


	2. jump cuts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I figure this will probably be about six parts total, unless I get really carried away.

The fact that sound has returned calms what little of Gavin’s nerves were still on edge. The temperature never falls below comfortable, but such a mundane thought is easy enough to push to the back of his mind.

It’s ages before he finds anyone else.

His feet are dragging by the time he finds Gus perched arbitrarily on a tree branch. He sticks out egregiously in a black tee shirt against the sterile white of the snow. “Hey, asshole,” Gus calls down to him, and Gavin wonders why the only greetings these strange incarnations of his friends know are insults. Gavin nods a little hello to Gus, sort of stupidly afraid to speak. He thinks his voice will be way too loud.

Gus jumps down from the branch, at least ten feet up. He sticks the landing, and snow doesn’t billow around him, and his feet are silent when he hits the ground. He walks over to Gavin and Gavin doesn’t miss the fact that he, too, leaves no footprints.

“What’re you doing here, Gavin?” Gus says conversationally, leading the way towards a darkened section of the woods that Gavin never would have gone down ordinarily. “This place doesn’t seem quite your speed.”

It’s not. “Um, I dunno, to be honest,” Gavin says, dragging his foot deliberately through the snow just to watch the mark it leaves. “I was somewhere else, and now I’m here, and Michael told me to walk this way, so…”

“You’ve seen Michael already?” A nod. “That’s something. Typically he likes popping out at the end. You’ll probably see him again sometime.”

They keep walking. Gavin keeps not saying much. Gus starts complaining about something—how Chris and Miles broke the coffee machine, maybe?—but Gavin’s only half-listening. It’s strange, this clashing of worlds. Gavin knows somewhere in the back of his mind that this Gus, who lives in the snowy woods, is using up the words of other Gus, who lives on the same street as Gavin, and works in the Rooster Teeth office and always complains about the coffee machine. Gavin’s pretty sure there’s no coffee machines here. He can’t see an outlet anywhere.

“…And it turns out that the bird was already dead anyway so it wasn’t that big a deal, and now Miles has to buy a new office coffee machine. I’m making him buy a Keurig because they’re cool and really expensive. So, here we are.”

Gavin tunes back in. “What?”

Gus stares at him like he’s suddenly grown three heads and talks to him in the patronizing tone he reserves for those times on the podcast when Gavin’s being especially thick. “We’re _here_ , you idiot. Go ahead, you can do it.”

Gus points at a door, not attached to anything, that Gavin hadn’t noticed they were coming upon. It’s ridiculous, and cliché, and sort of terrifying, and Gavin wants nothing more than to stay ten feet away from that door, at least. But Gus is pushing him towards it with one pointy finger right between his shoulder blades, just in the way that makes Gavin squirm uncomfortably. He rolls his shoulders and glares at Gus, and walks through the door. The knob is icy under his fingertips.

He half expected Gus to come with him. Then he figures he should have known better than that by now. Now he’s standing in a picturesque ballroom, overly ostentatious, draped with maroon tapestries and adorned with a glittering floor. There’s a chandelier hanging from the ceiling that looks very delicate and very expensive. The room is entirely empty, save for Barbara.

She’s wearing this sparkly red gown that someone more interested in gowns than Gavin would have probably described as stunning. Barbara smiles when she sees him there, which is immediately. And Gavin is no big fan of sparkly dresses, but he can’t help but notice that her gown shimmers under the lights when she moves.

“Hey, Gav,” she says, smiling, and she’s not grown-up Barbara. This is the fifteen-year-old Barbara that Gavin used to Skype with every day for years when he was fifteen-year-old Gavin. This is awkward, frizzy-haired Barbara with braces that was his closest confidant an ocean away when he was more-awkward, longhaired Gavin. His surroundings are unfamiliar but seeing her instantly settles his stomach. This is Barbara that he’s known for ten years, whose face he’s seen for nearly every single one of those days, even be it through a grainy, overpriced webcam.

“Hey, Barb,” he says, and Barbara asks, “You want some punch?”

“Punch?”

She nods behind him and there, where the door he came in from used to be, is a foldout table draped with a checkered paper cloth and littered with tacky confetti. It looks like something straight out of a low-budget high school dance—no, he realizes, it’s more than that. It’s the exact punch table from Gavin’s junior prom. Barbara starts pouring bright pink liquid into a red Solo cup.

“Remember prom?” she asks, handing him the cup. He wraps his hands around it but doesn’t take a sip just yet. “We had it around the same time. Neither of us had anyone to go with.”

Gavin smiles ruefully. “I left after an hour and my dad got mad at me ‘cause he’d rented the tux for the whole night. So I sulked and played Halo for hours in my room.”

Barbara laughs and the chandelier seems to shine brighter. “Remember when I got home and Skype’d you? I never told you this, but I specifically waited until prom ended to do it. I left early too, but I wanted you to believe I was out having fun. It was stupid. You were honest about it.”

Gavin thinks about saying something, but Barbara is regarding the punch bowl strangely. “You’ve always had a thing about honesty,” she says, circling the rim of the punch bowl with one finger. “You’re frank and blunt and that’s awesome.” A smile. A mirthless laugh. With one finger, Barbara tips the punch bowl off the table. Gavin lunges for it too late, but when it crashes to the floor and splashes onto the cuffs of his jeans, he doesn’t get wet.

“Don’t lose that,” she says, eyes serious. “Don’t lose that for anyone. Sometimes people _need_ to hear the truth, whether they want it or not.”

All at once she’s smiling. It’s like Gavin’s watching many Barbaras, clips through the ages, spliced together with messy jump cuts.

“I guess I should get to the _punch_ -line, huh?” she grins, waving her cup in his face. Gavin smiles despite himself. “Here’s the deal,” Barbara goes on, dropping her cup out of existence. “You need to get out of here. That’s bottom line. But before that’s allowed to happen, you have no choice but to stick around. So you might as well take advantage of that.” She smiles easily. Like any of this is easy.

“Where is _here_ , exactly—?” Gavin starts to say, but then Barbara’s eyes grow clouded. Suddenly she’s grown-up Barbara, wearing an Achievement Hunter shirt and a skater skirt. “I should go,” she says, as loud rumbling starts to sound through the room. The spilled punch on the floor starts to congeal, forming some sort of tangible mass, rising up from the ground in a maelstrom of pink. Gavin stares, dumbfounded, as the punch crashes to the ground again as soon as it reaches his height. There are no windows in the ballroom, but it is easy to imagine blinding flashes of lightning outside, if there even _is_ an outside in this place where he’s found himself. The reverberating echoes of thunder are a constant now, like an earthquake, not like the quick, sudden booms of storms that make his chest rumble like cracking fireworks. Barbara spares one last glance in his direction and disappears, and the table from his prom disappears along with her. The door does not reappear. No mysterious exits pop into existence. There’s a single resounding _crash,_ and Gavin barely has a chance to look up and register the glass chandelier tumbling from the ceiling and shattering all around him before it’s right there, glass pressing into his skin and lodging there, and he catches a flash of red in the corner of his eye that registers as Barbara’s gown but also, maybe, something else. But he doesn’t know for sure. He doesn’t remember.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (i hate to even mention it but i'm just drastically hoping my characterization isn't TOTALLY off. gavin might not seem like gavin simply because of the situation he's in, but he'll get more chances to actually, y'know, speak later on.)


	3. creaky floorboards

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ah yes, the family chapter. so obviously i took some liberties here-- i have no idea what gavin's childhood home looks like-- as well as leaving people out. gavin doesn't want his family in fics, so they're not here besides a vague reference. millie's not mentioned either upon the request of geoff and griffon. but i still have a lot of feelings about gavin being part of the ramsey family, as will become very apparent in this chapter.

When light filters through the darkness of Gavin’s unconsciousness, he’s not anywhere even remotely similar to the ballroom he’d just come from. He remembers the chandelier crashing over his head, splinters of glass pressing into him at all angles, the way it stung everywhere when he tried to move, like his skin was pulling awkwardly around needles impaled into all the worst places, acupuncture gone horribly wrong. But when he instinctively looks down at himself now, there are no shards of glass to be found, no bloodied clothes, no needles sticking out of him like he’s some mischievous god’s human voodoo doll. He lets out a small sigh of relief, but the lack of continuity in this strange place is a constant, nagging worry.

When he sums up the courage to look elsewhere from his body, he’s hit all at once with the enhanced senses of a blind man, deaf man, mute man, dead man walking. There’s a soft wind ruffling respectively though the trees and his hair. The concrete sidewalk under his hands is rough in a way that’s nearly a sensory overload. He can feel every pebble pressing harmlessly into his palms, every degree of the sun beating on his back.

It’s a lovely day in England.

Which is just where he is—he’s sitting on the sidewalk outside his parents’ house, the house he grew up in, the one with the shoddy blue paintjob and a few weeds struggling up through the cracks in the cement. He’s sitting there and staring, stupidly, at a house he hasn’t seen in years, because his parents moved out of it not too long after Gavin moved to America for good, faring much better now with a beige-colored condo in which they don’t need to do any yard work or listen to the yapping of their neighbor’s fussy Chihuahua. Sitting there staring up at it like it’s some formidable foe, flat on his ass, like he’d fallen there and hasn’t quite gained the strength to stand back up.

But he does. He stands, and brushes dirt and dust off of his jeans, and he walks right through the front door. It doesn’t even cross his mind to knock. This is his house, after all, and always will be, regardless of the wretched business of money-hungry real estate agents. He remembers being childishly upset when his parents called him in America and said they were moving out. He hadn’t lived there in a year but he got a small twang in the middle of his chest at the words, “ _Glad to be rid of that old place!_ ”

The door opens with a whine, just like it always does, and the scuffed old mat just outside the door welcomes Gavin into his used-to-be home. The floorboards creak upon Gavin’s third step, a step purposely placed, just to hear the welcoming sounds of coming back. It’s strange, having his heart so firmly buried in two places. On one side of him, he was raised here, in this creaky house with its creaky floorboards, with his parents and siblings running around, strong hands on his shoulders as he dealt with the rickety ups and downs of being a dorky teenager. This is where he learned to ride a bike, where he had his first kiss and first broken heart.

But on the other side, he belongs in a studio in the backyard of the coziest house he’s ever set foot in. A light-green house in Austin populated with the people who feel just as much like family as the real thing. People who built him his own place outside their house, close but not too close, just for him, so he could feel like a grown-up at eighteen but still like part of the family. Held him when he got homesick until that wasn’t possible anymore, because the location of _home_ had changed.

There are no creaky steps in the Ramseys’ house. But this blue house in England isn’t filled with the smells of Geoff cooking or the sounds of Griffon laughing, and he doesn’t think it has felt like _home_ for a while now. He has no idea when that happened. He doesn’t know why or how. He hadn’t even noticed the dramatic shift in where his love lies.

As soon as he realizes this, stepping off of the creaky floorboard, the two homes clash together in a whirlwind of culture. His parents with their likened accents, sterner voices, and longer history are the first things there, but then the Ramseys bust in and take over, filling the rooms with bustling sound and swirling color. It’s strange to see them here, sweeping through his home, but it’s oddly comforting as well. Mismatched parts of the places most familiar and contented coexist here, a home forged just for him, and for the first time since he left reality, Gavin feels _warm_ instead of _comfortable_.

Geoff is cooking when Gavin steps into the kitchen. “What’s up, lad?” Geoff says when he sees him. “You were almost late for dinner.”

Gavin settles into his seat at the table. One to the left of the head of the table, where Griffon sits, across from where Geoff does. “What’re we having?” he asks, fiddling with his fork. It’s easy to let himself go here.

“Salmon,” says Geoff, “but do you want to give me a hand over here? I’ve got a lot going on.”

Gavin laughs nervously. “Geoffrey, you know how well cooking and I mix.”

“You gotta step outside of your comfort zone sometimes, Gav,” Geoff says, ushering him over with his ridiculous, hot pink oven mitt. Gavin relents and starts chopping red onions very poorly. Next to Geoff’s perfectly shaped slices, his look mediocre at best. He sighs so hard his hair blows up.

“I mean, what if you never stepped out of your comfort zone, huh?” Geoff goes on, pulling a tray out of the oven and beginning to plate exquisitely. “Were you nervous when you left England and came to live with us?”

“Of course I was,” says Gavin as Geoff grabs a spare knife and starts chopping more onions with vigor. “I was seventeen and moving to a new country with a couple of heavily tattooed weirdos. I was petrified. But so excited.”

“See?” Geoff says. “Comfort zone fucking annihilated, dude.” He slaps a salmon onto a plate. “Boosh.”

“I guess,” says Gavin, a little uncertain of the entire lesson.

“He’s right,” chirps Griffon, emerging from some room Gavin hadn’t been paying attention to. “I can really pick ‘em.” She ruffles Gavin’s hair and snatches a cubed potato off one of the readied plates. “Hey!” chastises Geoff, waving her hand away. Griffon chuckles and kisses his cheek, perches on one of the barstools around the kitchen’s island. “If you were just a little more nervous, Gav, think of how different your life would be.”

He does—really does. Zones out while Geoff finishes up cooking, takes the knife from him to chop the rest of the onions in half Gavin’s time. Where would he be? England, obviously. Probably still doing film work of some sort—would he have come across slow motion filmography still? He has a Phantom because of Rooster Teeth. He can’t imagine spending ten thousand dollars on a camera of his own accord. Everything he has, he has because he came here. Because of this company so sure he had something to offer that they imported him from across the Atlantic, balls-annoying as it was to do. All of his friends he knows through Rooster Teeth. This offbeat American family he’s become a part of welcomed him because of Rooster Teeth. All of this, everything his life is made up of, all the best parts of him, are there because he was a gutsy, ambitious seventeen-year-old who got involved in a community and knew from the start that he wanted to live with the orange one from RvB. It was a wild, dangerous gamble. A chance he had to take. It could have all gone so wrong, but everything found its way to where it’s supposed to be. Everything in its right place. Last Gavin remembers, everything was in its right place.

Maybe he should give himself a little more credit.

“You should really give yourself a little more credit,” Griffon says when he tunes back in. Geoff is setting the plates down on the table. “You’ve made a great life for yourself. And we’re lucky you have, because otherwise we wouldn’t have you.”

Gavin looks at his makeshift family—small and loud and foreign, large at heart and understanding and so, so welcoming. The people who saw no problem with quasi-adopting a European teenager, giving him a job, seeing him every day for the next eight years and all the years after.

All the years after, Gavin thinks with a shudder as this Geoff squeezes his shoulder, if he can find his way back home. His real home, in the Ramseys’ real house, with the real Ramseys. Not these ghostly figments, blinking arbitrarily in and out of existence, here only to teach him something he already knew, if he could dig a little deeper inside himself for it. And maybe, he worries as this Geoff and this Griffon chat and laugh idly, almost indistinguishable from the real ones, to lull him into a false sense of security and keep him here.

Speaking of ghosts—

The dining room starts flashing as soon as the thought crosses his mind. For a second it’s his old house in England (or, the Jenkins’ house, now, since his parents sold it six years ago, a fact he likes to ignore) but then it’s the Ramseys’ place in Austin (or, his house, now, since he’s been living there for so long the thought of living anywhere else sends a shooting pain through his chest). The two homes start switching so rapidly that the rooms start to warp, and Gavin watches with stuttering breath as family photo on the mantelpiece in his parents’ house sags off the wall, as one of Griffon’s paintings begins to melt under the pressure of existence. His head spins. He feels like he’s stuck in glitch, repeating the same action over and over and over, crashing, crashing, crashing—

“Gavin, are you okay? Maybe you should get some fresh air,” Griffon is saying directly into his ear. Gavin looks desperately between her and Geoff, who both look positively concerned, a set of facial expressions he’s sure are yanked directly from his memories. Griffon starts shepherding him towards the back door, and Gavin struggles weakly against her, because he’s still switching, switching, switching between houses and he can’t find his footing, not anywhere. He watches with bated breath as Griffon opens the backdoor to her house, but halfway through the motion it switches to Gavin’s parents’ house, with its creaky floorboards and peeling blue paint, and the door groans under the weight him hanging onto it for some sort of paltry support. The last thing he feels is Griffon’s hand on his shoulder before he’s stumbling outside, landing on his knees, in grass that’s soft and dewy under his fingertips.

He wonders whose backyard he ended up in, but is for the moment too weary to check.


	4. inanimate glory

Gavin only lifts his head when a tiny blue sneaker wiggles its way into his field of vision. Gavin looks up slightly to see that, yes, the sneaker is attached to an equally tiny leg, and that leg is connected to a torso, and that torso is connected to the slightly-larger-than-average head of what is definitively a four-year-old Dan Gruchy.

“Dan?” Gavin says weakly, staring up at the toddler. It’s definitely Dan—he has the same black hair and twinkling eyes and chubby cheeks that he retained into adulthood. Gavin didn’t know Dan when he was this young, but he’s seen photos, and to be honest older Dan doesn’t look too different. More stubbly, maybe, and definitely taller. When Gavin stands Dan doesn’t quite reach his hip.

“B!” Dan says excitedly, raising his arms like he wants Gavin to pick him up. Gavin stares tiredly down at him, notices with a blink that Dan is wearing a very small version of his Slow Mo Guys lab coat—pristinely clean, though, not covered in paint and blood like the life-sized one is.

Wearily Gavin picks Dan up and balances him on his hip. “Hey, buddy,” he says, bouncing him around a little. Dan giggles and kicks his tiny legs eagerly.

“Why’re you so small?” Gavin asks, stupidly. As if there’s any reasonable explanation for anything that happens here.

Dan’s cartoonishly big brown eyes widen. As if in response to Gavin’s question, he hiccups and grows three years bigger. “Oh, all right,” Gavin blinks, promptly setting seven-year-old Dan down on the ground. His lab coat had grown with him, and now has a green smatter of paint on one of the lapels.

Dan flops to the ground. Before he gets there, a sandbox appears out of thin air to catch him, and Dan enthusiastically curls his fists into the little pieces. “Come ‘ere, B!” he calls, voice young and high-pitched. It’s adorable, really. Gavin perches on the edge of the sandbox and starts mashing sand together into a ball. Dan seems to be having trouble making things with his small, chubby hands. Gavin chuckles and tosses his sand ball at Dan’s chest, which makes Dan huff irritably. He grows four more years, and eleven-year-old hands build sand balls deftly, and even more swiftly begin to throw them at Gavin.

“I surrender, I surrender!” Gavin cries, falling backwards out of the sandbox. As soon as he leaves it, it disappears, and Dan is fifteen, a copy of Halo 2 in one hand and a bag of Cheetos in the other. He’s awkwardly sized, the way Gavin was too, and wearing the kind of nerdy shirt that led the two of them to be picked on in school.

“Wanna play, B?” Dan says conversationally around a mouthful of Cheetos. He sits down on the grass next to Gavin, breaks the seal on the case, and opens it up. Automatically holds it out to Gavin to smell.

“Hmm, seven out of ten,” Gavin decides. The disc is shattered, and sunlight bounces off of the broken pieces, forming gleaming broken rainbows on the glass.

Suddenly Dan is twenty-six and Gavin is wearing a lab coat with _Gav_ sewn into it in swirly script. Dan is smiling enigmatically, head cocked, staring down at six Polaroid pictures lying on the grass as if they belong there. They’re of Dan, at four and seven and eleven and fifteen and twenty-six, and Gavin is in all of the photos as he had just been, except that he wasn’t twenty-five in all of them. He was four and seven and eleven and an awkward, long-haired fifteen-year-old too, and he’s laughing with Dan like he probably would have been at that age. In the picture where he’s twenty-five, which Gavin recognizes is a screencap pulled straight from one of their most popular videos, he’s smiling contentedly. Contented—Gavin thinks that’s the perfect sort of all-encompassing word for how he felt in life, last he remembers it. His eyes linger on the photos one by one. A healthy, typical progression of a kid growing up. It was all so healthy until it wasn’t. It was all so typical until it wasn’t. Healthy and typical, Gavin thinks, came to an abrupt halt when he died.

“We’re doing the video where we smash the electricity ball thing, now, yeah?” Dan asks, fiddling with the Phantom.

Gavin rubs his hands over his face. Of all the stored Slow Mo Guys ideas his brain could have conjured up, it had to go with the most complicated one. “Uh, ‘m not sure that’ll work, since slow motion filming needs so much light to actually go, it might drown out the lights of the plasma…”

Dan looks up from the camera and grins. “Have a little faith, B!” he chirps. “It could work, and the thing was only twenty quid anyways. It’ll look cool to us at least.”

“Where is—?” Gavin starts to say, but then he blinks there’s an unpackaged plasma ball there on the lawn, ready to go, a sledgehammer lying innocently next to it. The plasma ball sits, so unaware of its fate, in all its inanimate glory.

Dan readies the camera. He doesn’t ask Gavin to check the controls, either, even though Gavin’s usually the one to program the Phantom. He has no idea if Dan did it right, but he figures it doesn’t matter, because this is one video that will never make it to YouTube.

“Fire away, B!” Dan calls, face blocked from Gavin’s view behind the preview screen, and Gavin figures he’s got nothing—literally nothing—to lose. His lab coat billows around legs. Dan’s is covered in paint now. Gavin can’t decide whether the colors look brighter here or in reality.

Gavin raises the sledgehammer all the way above his head, can feel his muscles straining against it as he holds it there for a moment. Then he lets all the weight barrel down, down, down.

The plasma ball explodes in a frenzy of plastic shards and beaming electrodes. It’s not possible, but the force of the freed energy expanding in all directions lifts Gavin off his feet and carries him back, way back, into the fence at the perimeter of his yard. Gavin feels his back hit it, the potency of the strength immeasurable, and _something_ cracks. Gavin doesn’t know if it’s his bones or the wood. Figures it doesn’t really matter. But when his head catches up to the rest of the body and hits the fence with a jarring _bang_ that resonates in his skull, and his world cuts to black like the end of a bad 80’s movie, he thinks that part might actually be of import.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was originally going to have another scene included in it, but it just wasn't coming to me and i've sort of gotten into this three-day schedule and felt like i had to post something (so you have my apologies if it seems a bit short).


End file.
